Onion Goes Audio/Visual, Dewars Foots the Bill, Deep Focus Blogs

Watch out, world - the Onion, our news source of choice, is leaping from the written word and taking on CNN with its own newscast: ONN, "faster, harder, scarier and all-knowing."

The Onion's Sean Mills gets strangely sober in his effort to explain: "[Comedy Central and Saturday Night Live] are parody shows, and this is serious news," he says. "There's no studio audience, and no one's in on the joke. What we are trying to create is a broadcast-quality newscast on the Internet."

Arm-in-arm with the effort is Dewar's, which leaps in with the first series of ads, brought to us by the fine folk of Deep Focus. Other early adopting sponsors include MSNBC, which doesn't shy away from potentially less inane competition; Hyundai, which needs all the exposure it can get; and Red Stripe, about whom we know so little ad-wise that it's not even worth trying to barrage them. Per Deep Focus' specs the ads appear in retro "brought to you by" fashion, just before info on upcoming news segments.

And in other, almost unrelated news, Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer finally jumps aboard the self-adulating blog-o-rama, explaining in confidence, "I'm sick of agency blogs without real opinions or points of view. Hopefully I can change that a bit." Read a more elaborate manifesto here. Support him, Deep Focus, and perhaps in some way ONN by reading Monsieur Schafer's waxy prose. Or just watch ONN. Or do both. Both would probably yield the best water cooler fodder.